Free Republic

Iran’s imposition of “sanctions” on dozens of Americans amounts to an assassination threat against members of former President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a senior U.S. official who threatened “severe consequences” for any harm done to them. “Make no mistake: the United States of America will protect and defend its citizens,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Sunday. “This includes those serving the United States now and those who formerly served.” Iranian officials have made explicit their interest in killing one of the people involved in the U.S. strike that killed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Gen. Qassem Soleimani....

President Ebrahim Raisi urges formation of a 'fair court' in which former President Trump and other US officials are tried Tehran-Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi has said former President Donald Trump must face justice for his role in the assassination of top general Qassem Soleimani two years ago, or else Iran will have revenge. In a televised speech on Monday, the Iranian president said as the "main criminal and killer" who ordered the deadly drone attack on Soleimani's convoy in Iraq, Trump must face "God's ruling and suffer "qisas" which is the Islamic term for retaliation in kind...

Israel shared three cell phone numbers used by Qasem Soleimani with U.S. intelligence in the hours before American drones unleashed Hellfire missiles on the Iranian general last year, Yahoo News reported Saturday. The revelation sheds new light on the role that Israel played in the killing of Soleimani, who the State Department says was responsible for hundreds of U.S. troop deaths as the head of the Revolutionary Guard's elite Quds Force. The drone strike occurred shortly after midnight on Jan. 2, 2020, as Soleimani and his entourage were leaving Baghdad's international airport. As three Delta Force sniper teams monitored Soleimani...

A new propaganda music video paying tribute to Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Gen. Qassem Soleimani, depicts Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) forces destroying the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C. On Sunday, Kasra Aarabi, an Iran analyst for the Tony Blair Institue tweeted a clip of the video, depicting an explosion at the Capitol, which was aired on Iranian state tv ahead of a speech by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. “Today pre-Khamenei talk, Iran state TV aired this clip depicting an IRGC attack on #Congress Yes, it’s propaganda. But it shows the anti-US ideology of #IRGC, which...

While there is not much time left until June 18, the day of the presidential elections in Iran, the war between the two factions within the regime for winning this seat has escalated. On April 25, a letter signed by 220 members of the Iranian parliament was published in the media. The MPs asked Ebrahim Ra'isi, the head of the regime's judiciary, to run for the presidency. The letter was published contrary to the usual custom of non-interference of the legislature in the affairs of the executive branch. Ra'isi's endorsement is also interpreted as an attack against the current president,...

A linguist for the Department of Defense pleaded guilty on Friday to passing classified information about U.S. human intelligence sources to an individual with ties to Hezbollah, a Lebanese terrorist organization, the Department of Justice said. Mariam Taha Thompson began sending the information after the U.S. killed Qassem Soleimani, a top Iranian military commander, in an airstrike in early 2020, according to court documents. Thompson, who held a top secret security clearance, had been stationed at a Special Operations Task Force facility in Iraq from mid-December 2019 until her arrest a few months later. Years before she began passing classified...

Colin Kahl opposed sanctions on IRGC, condemned killing of Iranian terror chief Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee are meeting privately on Tuesday morning to discuss their growing policy concerns about Colin Kahl, President Joe Biden's nominee for undersecretary of defense for policy at the Pentagon, according to sources close to the committee. Kahl, a former Obama State Department official, was a key architect of the Iran deal and has been at the forefront of a number of controversial moves, including, reportedly, the decision to remove a statement affirming Jerusalem as Israel's capital from the 2012 Democratic National Convention...

Iran’s state media has alleged that in addition to the United States, several countries, including Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Germany and Britain, had played a role in the assassination of its senior military leader Qassem Soleimani. Soleimani was killed in a US drone strike on January 3, 2020, while visiting Baghdad. According to DEFA Press, more countries would be added to the list once the investigation into Soleimani’s killing is completed. “We must learn from this experience, which came at a great price, and we must make every effort to preserve national unity and cohesion that was achieved...

The protest will go on as planned tomorrow against the coronavirus restrictions endorsed by the incoming Governor of Utah Republican Spencer Cox. The protest to be held as Cox's motorcade heads to an ampitheater in southern Utah for his inauguration... Court hearings for two Washington restaurants opened in spite of COVID-19 restrictions imposed by Democrat Governor Jay Inslee set for Tuesday... The British police crackdown on protests opposing the coronavirus lockdowns and restrictions in the country continued this weekend... British Prime Minister Boris Johnson pushing tighter controls and restrictions in the coming weeks... Restrictions that have been imposed in the...

Power struggle at the head of the ruling regime in Iran Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, understanding the structure of the ruling system in Iran and the decision-making mechanism, at times, has sometimes been challenging and difficult to understand and analyze. Although the "Vali-Faghih or the Supreme Leader" is at the top of the system's pyramid of power, the president holds the executive power. Still, the order of decision-making institutions in Iran is not clear, and this has long led to a dispute over authority between leaders of the regime who are at the center of its influence and...

‘Whistleblower’ calls out John Kerry, says he ‘knows for fact’ Obama admin sent multiple letters directly to Soleimani Middle East expert Michael Doran slammed former Secretary of State John Kerry in a series of tweets exposing the Obama administration’s dealings with Iran. “I must become a whistleblower,” Doran, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute specializing in Middle East security issues, tweeted Friday in response to a self-serving opinion piece by Kerry published by The New York Times. Doran called out Kerry for his op-ed and the “ludicrous and reckless contention” that “diplomacy” with Iran and the nuclear deal negotiated...

A curfew in Philadelphia tonight from 9pm to 6am. Streets in the downtown area closed. Members of the Pennsylvania National Guard deployed... A federal judge in Portland granting a preliminary injunction saying that federal officers denied First Amendment rights to peaceful protesters... Walmart removing firearms and ammunition from display floors...Today Walmart reversing course... The country with the highest coronavirus infection rate in Europe moving to a national lockdown. Belgium shutting down... In Canada Winnipeg the largest city in Manitoba moving to a Code Red coronavirus lockdown... An earthquake measuring 7.0 struck off the coast of Turkey today... The current UK...

Newsdump Update: US Sends More Troops, Armored Vehicles To Syria Following Recent Incident With Russian Military Police Six Bradley fighting vehicles and 100 soldiers sent into northeast Syria...... Fantasy news out there nowadays along with the real news that I like to post here...We led off with the story in Syria where Russian and American soldiers have played cat and mouse games and even "bumper cars".... The Republicans are backed by the energy industry in the US and folks like Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton pushing for sanctions on Russia and even a Democrat mixed in Jean Shaheen. She must...

Former Democratic Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman said that he does not believe there was evidence to impeach President Trump and believes he would have voted to acquit if he were still in the Senate. "The call that President Trump made with President Zelensky of Ukraine was inappropriate, was wrong, it shouldn't have been done," Lieberman said to the Blaze’s Glenn Beck. “But did it reach the point where we can say nine months before an election ... that, if we keep him in office, he represents a danger to the country? I don't think so," he added. Lieberman did say...

The Iran deal was never meant to stop Iran from building a bomb—it was supposed to delay it until disaster happened on someone else’s watchIn the wake of the targeted killing of Iranian terror master Qassem Soleimani, an interesting fight has broken out—after Donald Trump failed to brief them in advance of the strike, Democrats began fulsomely criticizing the president. This led Republican lawmakers to accuse their counterparts across the aisle of pro-terrorist sympathies. Maybe Republicans are still sore that Barack Obama compared them to Iranian hardliners like Soleimani for denouncing his signature foreign policy initiative, the Iran nuclear deal,...

An Iranian has called for a multi-million dollar bounty on President Donald Trump for the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani in Iraq in a .legal military operation. If Iranians would accept removal from office instead of death, Democrats like Nancy Pelosi might have a chance at the reward.

Qassem Soleimani to the millions of people of Iran, Iraq, Syria and the Middle East, was known as the butcher of families & the destroyer of cities. But for the Democrats, he was innocent and President Trump was the one that killed an innocent man, but the forget that Soleimani was responsible for at least 600 US soldier deaths in Iraq. The Dems might want to take those words back because the recent video shows the real character of the now killed terrorist Qasem Soleimani and his followers.

Senate Democratic leadership is urging President Trump to declassify the official war powers notification he submitted to Congress regarding the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani via a drone strike. Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Ranking Member Bob Menendez wrote a letter Sunday to Mr. Trump asking him to release the notification that was transmitted to Congress this weekend. The letter to the president was made public on Monday. “It is critical that national security matters of such import be shared with the American people in a timely manner,” Mr. Schumer and Mr. Menendez wrote. “An entirely classified notification is simply not...

The assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani is an unusual, possibly aberrant, event. The killing of this individual leader of a sovereign state may lead to all-out war between Iran and the U.S. — or, on the other hand, the assassination may bring an end to the cycle of Iranian violence countered by U.S. and world diplomatic flatulence and appeasement. Assassinating the leaders of terrorist organizations — i.e., non-state actors, such as Osama bin Laden and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi — did not lead to a greater war footing against the USA because, as terrorist organization leaders, not heads of state,...

BEIRUT (AP) — The latest on U.S.-Iran tensions (all times local): 4:45 p.m. Iraq’s parliament has voted to expel the U.S. military from the country. Lawmakers voted Sunday in favor of a resolution that calls for ending foreign military presence in the country. The resolution’s main aim is to get the U.S. to withdraw some 5,000 U.S. troops present in different parts of Iraq. The vote comes two days after a U.S. airstrike killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani inside Iraq, dramatically increasing regional tensions. The Iraqi resolution specifically calls for ending an agreement in which Washington sent troops to Iraq...